A lead is a person or company that has expressed some interest in your products but has not yet been qualified as a genuine buying prospect. In B2B commerce, a lead usually appears before any pricing conversation begins, often through a contact form, an email inquiry, or a request for quote. At this stage you know someone is curious, but you do not yet know whether they have the budget, authority, or intent to actually buy.
How a lead forms
A lead is created the moment someone gives you enough information to follow up. On a Shopify store selling to businesses, that trigger is frequently a Request a Quote submission: a buyer enters their name, company, email, and the items or quantities they want. The store owner now has a contact record and a starting point, but no deal yet.
Lead versus prospect
The two terms are easy to confuse. A lead is unqualified interest. A prospect is a lead you have vetted and judged worth pursuing, because they match your customer profile and show real intent. Every prospect starts as a lead, but not every lead becomes a prospect. Qualifying (through a reply, a call, or a discovery question) is what moves someone from one stage to the next.
Why it matters for B2B quoting
B2B sales rarely close on a fixed price at checkout. The lead is the top of a longer funnel: inquiry, qualification, quote, negotiation, order. Treating every lead as if it were a ready buyer wastes time, and treating none of them seriously loses revenue. Capturing leads in a structured way lets you sort the serious inquiries from the tire kickers before you invest in custom pricing.
For Shopify merchants, this is where an RFQ workflow helps. Instead of leads scattered across your inbox, each quote request becomes a trackable record you can qualify, price, and convert into a real order when the buyer is ready.
Example
A distributor fills out your quote form asking for 500 units of one SKU. That is a lead. After a short email exchange confirming their business, timeline, and budget, they become a qualified prospect, and you send pricing.